Our Core Beliefs

Variation in human ability is ordinary, not special, and affects most of us for some part of our lives.

Our Philosophy

The Institute for Human Centered Design has chosen to use the term "human centered design" as the most representative of our philosophy. We are invested in the international universal design/design-for-all/inclusive design movement but we believe that it is important to be open to complementary ideas that make sense within the simple and open framework of human centered design. Important parallel trends today include green design and design for health and healing. We see value in finding the common ground between movements and in working collaboratively.

We embrace our ongoing relationship with our traditional allies in disability and aging. We try to be attentive to the spectrum of ability that poses less obvious demands upon design, especially chronic illness and the cognitive spectrum of disability. We believe that the link between chronic illness and/or disability and poverty must catalyze action that includes a new attention to the role of design. With our stated mission of enhancing human experience, we see everyone under the umbrella of human centered design.

To borrow from our colleague Ray Lifchez, we see all design as a "social art" inclusive of urban design, landscape architecture, architecture, interior design, industrial design and information design. Design is also problem-solving and we would extend the usual design disciplines to include policy making.

Our History

The Institute for Human Centered Design, formerly know as Adaptive Environments (AE), was founded in 1978 by Elaine Ostroff and Cora Beth Able, an outgrowth of the Arts and Human Services Project, a multi-disciplinary graduate program supported by the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. The graduate program emphasized the leadership role of artists and designers in creating community-based programs for people with disabilities. The design emphasis coincided with the deinstitutionalization movement of the late 1970s in which people with disabilities, many of them children, were moving from institutions into communities. Schools, libraries, entertainment and recreation places, public space, even homes were not designed to accommodate this new level of community diversity. The Institute for Human Centered Design began with a focus on helping families and communities solve practical problems of the design of places. It engaged designers in the work and taught design students the power of design to shape social equity.